Summer Announcements

Nesting birds, nesting me

Hi everyone,

I’m sorry for the longer-than usual break between these (especially to my beloved paid subscribers, whose great taste in newsletters deserves to be rewarded with more). I do have a pretty good excuse, which is that my wife and I recently welcomed our first child home and have been taking care of our baby, Ethan. He was born last week and is doing very well, but we’ve been holed up and preoccupied with all the stuff that comes with having a week-old kid. It’s been exhausting but also a lot of fun. I’ve watched to the end of Mets games that start at 10PM for the first time since I worked at a restaurant, lulling the little guy to sleep with the sweet music of Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez chatting in the booth.

More than once, I’ve had the thought that this new routine feels like working on a boat during an overnight passage. There’s oddball night-watch schedules, and intense rituals around cooking, cleaning, and provisioning. You have to be awake and attentive during long periods where very little happens, and deliberate about how you do simple things (picking up objects to move them from one room to another, e.g., requires a lot of thought about what order they should be moved in). All of which is to say: I’ve had my hands full!

Nevertheless, the earth continues to rotate, and there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in and around New York Harbor in the near future, including tours with me. This installment of Landlubber will be a brief-but-informative run-through of some of those coming attractions ahead of a longer piece in the next week or so.

Classic Harbor Line Eco-Tours:

This summer, I’m once again leading some boat tours of the abandoned heron islands of the East River and Hell Gate whenever guide extraordinaire Gabriel Willow is out of town or otherwise occupied. These tours are pretty special, and offer close looks at some of the coolest places in New York Harbor. Last year, a talented photographer named Preeti Desai came along on one of Gabriel’s tours and took these wonderful photos, which she put on her blog! The dates and times for my boat tours are:

Sunday, June 15^th at 7:30 PM

Sunday July 27^th At 7:30 PM

Sunday, Aug 24, 6:35pm

Monday, Aug 25, 5:30pm

The link to book those is here!

Gabriel is doing all of the other dates listed on that link, and his tours are also excellent. He is a friend of this newsletter, and if one of his dates works better for you than any of mine, go on that one instead (and say hi for me!) He has a whole bunch of other programming listed here on his website, too, including some nighttime tours of Central and Prospect Park, at least one of which I’m determined to make it to this summer.

Bird Alliance Walks:

I’m leading an “Intro to Birding” walk in Marine Park on Sunday, June 15th at 9:00 AM (Meeting at the Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Center). That’s Father’s Day, so if you’re looking for something to do with your dad, this is a pretty good option (sadly, my son will still be too young to tag along.) If you make it to the Marine Park tour and to my boat tour that evening, I’ll give you a special shoutout by name in the next installment of Landlubber.

I’m also leading a series of shoreline walks out along the protected shorebird area in Arverne and Edgemere this summer. We’ll meet on the Boardwalk at Beach 59th Street and walk east, keeping an eye out for nesting terns, piping plovers, black skimmers, etc. The dates/times for those are below. They aren’t up on the Bird Alliance website yet, but I’ll circle back and link them whenever they go up.

Saturday 7/12, 9:30-11:00 AM

Sunday 7/20, 9:30-11:00 AM

Wednesday 8/13, 6:00-7:30 PM

Saturday 8/23, 9:30-11:00 AM

Saturday, 8/30, 9:30-11:00 AM

MORESHOE CRABS:

We’re approaching the last big full moon for Atlantic horseshoe crab spawning season this coming Wednesday (6/11). High tide at Plumb Beach is at 8:50 PM that day, so if you’d like to experience those wonderful prehistoric monsters at the peak of their annual spawn, that’d be a good time and place to do so! If you go, please don’t step on their eggs and try to behave by taking your trash with you and being respectful of the wildlife.

I was hoping to lead a horseshoe crab walk this season as a free perk for paying Landlubber subscribers, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make it there at all due to childcare stuff. We’ll see! If you want to read about the ancient spawn, here’s my piece about horseshoe crabs from around this time last year!

FISH FLOTILLA

Riverkeeper is hosting their first ever Fish Migration Celebration on Saturday the 14th. It’s a floating parade that will travel up the Hudson to honor the enormous burst of sea life that pulses up and down the river each spring. It starts in Chelsea, and ends in Croton, with events at various locations along the shore.

R.I.P. TO A REAL ONE

I thought this obituary of Orien McNiel in the times last week was lovely: a fine tribute to someone who embodied the spirit of New York’s wonderful, weird, polluted waterways.